Smoked a 10 pound pork butt today. Went on at 9:30am, was at 195 at 6:30pm. Was an interesting cook. I have been having a lot of problems getting temps up in my PBC, where it seemed to like to settle in around 230. I used Kingsford competition yesterday for chicken, and was able to get 325 degrees.
Today I went with regular blue and white Kingsford. I used Kathryn's method of heating the PBC, and the temps got really hot quickly. It hit 399, I covered it, and within seconds it went to 450. I thought it would come down to the typical range, but it settled around 375! I ended up closing the bottom vent a bit more, turned the PBC so that the vent side was facing the garage (and less open to breezes) and had to plug the rebar holes with tin foil to get it to settle around 325. A few hours later, it was at 275 for a good spell, then it dropped pretty quickly to 230. I had to prop the lid open to get the temps up a bit as I had a house full of hungry people.
The only thing I can think that was different was that this morning, there was a good breeze and low humidity. For most of my cooks the humidity has been fairly high. This afternoon the humidity picked up pretty significantly, and the temps started falling fairly rapidly.
All in all, was another great pork butt. I thought about cutting it in half given it's size, but it was bone-in and I didn't want to screw things up with a bad cut. But 9 hours in the PBC wasn't too bad. I hit a pretty big stall at 158 degrees again like my last butt. This time I wrapped it during the stall rather than riding it out. Wrapped it tightly in tin foil, added a little of my favorite beer, Lagunitas "Little Sumptin Sumptin", and had amazing au jus at the end. Hard to beat pulled pork out of the PBC!
Today I went with regular blue and white Kingsford. I used Kathryn's method of heating the PBC, and the temps got really hot quickly. It hit 399, I covered it, and within seconds it went to 450. I thought it would come down to the typical range, but it settled around 375! I ended up closing the bottom vent a bit more, turned the PBC so that the vent side was facing the garage (and less open to breezes) and had to plug the rebar holes with tin foil to get it to settle around 325. A few hours later, it was at 275 for a good spell, then it dropped pretty quickly to 230. I had to prop the lid open to get the temps up a bit as I had a house full of hungry people.
The only thing I can think that was different was that this morning, there was a good breeze and low humidity. For most of my cooks the humidity has been fairly high. This afternoon the humidity picked up pretty significantly, and the temps started falling fairly rapidly.
All in all, was another great pork butt. I thought about cutting it in half given it's size, but it was bone-in and I didn't want to screw things up with a bad cut. But 9 hours in the PBC wasn't too bad. I hit a pretty big stall at 158 degrees again like my last butt. This time I wrapped it during the stall rather than riding it out. Wrapped it tightly in tin foil, added a little of my favorite beer, Lagunitas "Little Sumptin Sumptin", and had amazing au jus at the end. Hard to beat pulled pork out of the PBC!
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